“It’s insane! People are contacting me from all over the world since last week’s Oscar student finalists’ announcement,” says the Danish-born director Lumer-Klabbers, speaking to nordicfilmandtvnews.com from Haugesund.

Papapa, her graduation film from Lillehammer’s Norwegian Film School, is among eight narrative shorts from international film schools, running for the coveted US Student Academy Award 2020, to be handed out on October 15. 

The 22-minute fiction film written by Emil Flornes Wahl, stars Danish seasoned actor Thure Lindhardt (The Bridge, The Last Kingdom) and Norwegian rising acting talent Anna Filippa Hjarne. Set in a near future, we follow the young girl Elin who grew up with two mothers and has had zero contact with her biological father.

After her 18th birthday, she is finally given the opportunity to meet him, thanks to a F.A.R clinic, specialised in facilitating first encounters between donor-fathers and children. This is set up through experimental therapy exercises to make up for lost time and give the parent/child relationship a kickstart. But for Elin, her first meeting with her Danish donor father Jens proves more complex than anticipated.

Lumer-Klabbers says the story is inspired by her own upbringing in the Danish countryside by two mothers, and difficulty to connect with her biological father, based in Holland. “I only saw my father a few times when I was a child,” she explains. “How do you connect on an emotional level, if you don’t really know a person? I felt a bit guilty about this, and it took me some time to understand the ‘feeling’ of having a father,'" says the young filmmaker who dedicated her film to her father.

Regarding her collaboration with top actor Thure Lindhardt, Lumer-Klabbers says “working with him was amazing”. “Good actors ask the right questions; you have to be prepared, know what you want and use them to find the answers together. Thure has a very strong presence on set and he was very generous by delivering a rich performance.”

The director has just locked another short film - Radio Silence -, and has two feature length films in development in Denmark. “It was a great experience for me as a Dane, to study filmmaking in Norway,” she comments. “That allowed me from an early stage to establish a good network across Scandinavia."

Her first feature length project Woman Walking that she wrote with her Norwegian Film School colleague Emil Flornes Wahl, will be pitched at the upcoming Nordic Talents to be held October 21-22.

The pitching event from Nordic graduation students is co-organised by Nordisk Film & TV Fond and the National Film School of Denmark. “Woman Walking is a low budget high-concept film about a woman, who starts to walk endlessly in a seemingly random pattern in a field,” says Lumer-Klabbers. The project will be produced by Victor Cunha at Monolit Film, credited for the short film Villa Villekulla by Patricia Bbaale Bandak winner of last year’s Nordic Talents Pitch Award.

Lumer-Kladders’ other feature project in development - Vildfaren - a more ambitious film about incest, will be produced by the established Danish production company Motor (Deliver Us).